Australian comic book artist Ashley Wood paints an epic vista of expressionistic robot warfare in his art book World War Robot. I find these pieces triggering an immediate and impactful emotional response in comparison to the scores of technically competent but trite robot fare out there.
(above) One of my favourite pieces in the book, capturing the zeitgeist of WWII’s era perfectly.
The medium used seems positively oil paint to me, but I understand Ashley Wood sometimes combine it with digital techniques. Does anyone know if this is the case here ? There were no technical notes on the making in the book so I have no clue.
Fantastic pieces of art work all around from Ashley Wood, in a huge hard cover volume. This one gets my highest recommendations.
“World War Robot – Ashley Wood” art book details :
Dimensions – 12 x 0.6 x 12 inches
Hard cover, 99 pages
Color, in English
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June 2nd, 2013 at 10:53 pm
he does use digital a lot, but i think for this book it is almost entirely unretouched oil paint. i love Ashley Wood, but i really have been suffering a little fatigue in his releases over the past couple years. he has a real habit of rereleasing the same material over and over again in different volumes; he will release book one, then a hardcover of book one, then book two, then a hardcover of book two, then a hardcover of books one and two together, then book three, then a hardcover of all three, etc…
he also has a huge habit of pumping up huge projects and then giving up on them after one or two issues before starting something else and repeating the process. he is purely images, but sometimes that’s okay.
he often works with his wife, TP Louise, and maybe that is the issue; she is a good enough writer, they just never produce finished work together, and maybe it would take him being commissioned by someone else to do something to make it actually go to completion.
either way, i still love his work, i just wish he would show more variety in it from time to time. he focuses mostly now on vinyl toys, i think, and there is a huge, expensive market for that all over the world, so i can understand if he doesn’t have as much incentive to work on something as thankless as comics when he can make a ton of money on variant colors of the exact same vinyl figure.
June 3rd, 2013 at 11:52 pm
Zack – Thanks for the extra information, as always. I’m really liking what I see in this book and will look out for his other works. :]
btw, Cobalt 60 mentioned some upcoming Moebius publications in this older post :
http://cdn.halcyonrealms.com/illustration/the-eyes-of-the-cat-moebius-jodorowsky-book-review/
You might be interested. :]
June 5th, 2013 at 3:55 am
hey, I’m a die hard Ash fan, I love his work and my entire house is filled with it. He rereleases his stuff because all of it sells out very fast, and since new fans are always beging for more books he reissues them as new bundles.He has released a lot of stuff over the years, but the most epic saga which is still ongoing is Popbot, a graphic novel about a crazy multiverse. He’s also releasing a new deluxe revision of WWR with extra stuff this summer so you might hold out for that one. Ash has a wide variety and an evolving style. I visited his show last october in NYC and those works were some very dark soft erotic pieces. The catalog of that show will also be available this summer. When you want an allround look at his work up till 2009 you’ll need to get his Extreme Finales tome of artworks, awesome stuff. Definitly worth a review, yonghow.
June 5th, 2013 at 11:30 am
i understand what you’re saying, but for a while, everything he was putting out from IDW was still in print, or at least still widely available. i have most of his work up to a certain point as well, including every Popbot single issue and two separate collected editions; it’s basically a “story” that is set up to do whatever he wants with it, but the downside is that it also lets him be kind of lazy with it and reuse paintings from other works as single pages for it. i love his art, and i still check out his blog regularly, but i am just bummed that there is little to no literary content to his work; as a visual artist he is great, but i keep holding out for more stuff like D’Airain Adventure, which seemed really promising, then was given up on; and Lore, which i thought was really excellent, which was also given up on, so i ended up having to buy the super deluxe hardcover edition of it just to get one issue’s worth of an ending, and that was after already owning another trade of it.
the bottom line is that he does incredible work, but his drive is turned off very easily for a single work, and although everyone can be guilty of that, it’s especially frustrating to see that from someone who is incredibly talented and whose work i appreciate very much. i just have a hard time getting excited when i hear him announce some new project i know he is never going to finish.